Chicago
He gives me handcuffs for Christmas when he arrives in January. Such a long aching tension up and down my spine as we say nothing. Two months later he drives away alone. I sit immobilized. I'm consumed by violent repetition. Searching for erasure I sleep. Waking to reach for him I become thin with desire. I cover everything with red velvet with which I want to crush him beneath me down into those fibers that scrape my skin raw.

The day I notice he cleaned all of the ashtrays before he left I'm the most shocked of all.

Maintenance is difficult. I explore this uneasy relationship with solitude. I quit my job. I wash my clothes. I enter chaos. Turning into a vegetable rotting by the curb, I hope the maggots growing inside me will eat his brain. Memories consume time, rising up without order or connection. Stumbling through confusion I end up in self-inflicted hesitation. Sirens and tires squealing fill my nights. Voices in the alley outside my window invade my sleep. Fires burn all over the city as I watch from my window.

I have fewer and fewer words left. Casually, I think about the word insanity. I can no longer find definitions so this has no meaning. Nothing is the correct size. I don't recognize the space between my arms and the table. None of my clothes fit. I change again and again, looking for something that feels familiar. When I squint I can just barely see the ground. I pretend that I'm numb but a long thin scream rises, has slowly risen and it smothers me. I stop making plans. Memories now pour directly out of my eyes and ears. I've lost the world completely. On a precipice needing sleep I try to find my body.

A sense of dislocation concretizes itself. My fingers bruise my belly. Hold on as I clench my skin and dig those fingers deeper. The scream moves inward. I force myself to remain on the floor to feel it all the way to the edge. There is none. Suffocation in the pillow. I fall through the floor. The knot in my stomach is gone because I have taken the kitchen knife and carefully sliced it out. I lift it, steaming, and place it in front of me. I make it my altar.

(Others seem to function properly and I examine them closely to see if they are robots.)

Attached to my core I sit by the window. Awkward and raw. I have no belief that life will be long enough to let me figure this out. The simple action of turning the door handle has become too large. The smallest things send me sprawling. I don't leave the house even for the corner store. Arching my back I begin, I stretch my leg searching blindly for that rhythm. I dance alone next to the couch. I come to touch him. I come to seduce. I come to get lost. And I come. To bite his nipples with a long slow motion. A long slow rocking motion. Words pour out needing to be said that I want to get lost in his body. Needing to be said that I want his shoulders to surround me. My skin crawls off my body and it dances. It dances for him. He rides his needle. I dance alone. I remember another time. A look. Brushing by in the hallway. We don't care who hears the fucking noises. This is what we spend years trying to return to.

I finally see the garbage around me and I fill bag after bag. Being pulled inside my senses are dulled. Or have they been so sharpened that I've finally reached a distance? If I could find a way to let this scream out I could rule the world. I can't stabilize the present tense. I want my body to move and bend backwards so that I feel as if the world is splitting in half. My deepest levels lie in the everyday. For two days I scrub the kitchen floor with a small rag because it just won't become clean. I wash my clothes in the bathtub. I scrub the skin off my arms and face. I shave all the hair off my body. I am supposed to leave in two hours.

We are meeting again. Repetition is violent. I'm so slow to learn.

NYC
24 hours later the bus enters the cement. Port Authority New York City. We all fall out, 7am Sunday morning. The crowd is thin. I sit in the corner - smoking - hunched into my shoulders on top of my suitcase that is too heavy to carry just yet. I see his green hair wandering through the terminal. Standing I watch them watching him as he looks for me. He's extremely preoccupied. Find a taxi. Hurry. We have to get out of here now. My body is still on the bus and I try to keep up. I hold myself tight so he never notices how far away I really am. I've come to visit. I stay two months.

Something is terribly wrong here. Infection brings clarity. Fever rides my body and nausea rearranges priorities. I struggle to remain breathing, to remain clear. They sky is gray with pressure and all the colors sharp. Mood swings. The sky becomes dark almost black, heavy with a storm. The phone rings, a tornado has hit down a neighboring city. Sirens are beginning and a woman's screams are heard through the window. Wait for the rupture. Heavy air. Hot to touch. So thick that we pause. In a doorway we wait for the rain to begin. Your smell floats next to me through this thick air. A sense of dislocation, it's past too late for me to know you.

Later I sit in the park. A jolt through the nod. I'm sitting under the streetlight on the bench reading today's news. I scour the paper for words that will say something to me. I look up at the sound. A car slowly rolls by and I catch the policeman's eye riding past, two miles an hour - slow motion - we examine each other. My skin is dirty, no face can survive such scrutiny, I offer mine anyway.

We can't even pour water for coffee. We shut the door and smoke endless cigarettes. Giggling. (I'm trying to remember those lips scraping through my skin. I shake so hard that I can't stand up. Broken open I begin to fall and he grabs me. His lips curl back as we stand, fall, fuck. On the counter, on the floor. We crawl over each other. I want to go with marks on my body. I want to go feeling hands on my flesh. )

I don't really want him anymore only that clearly lit place where we met. He has no meaning here. I left that months ago.

Frankfurt
Bad TV and rainy weather. I can't find a connection back to myself. Chasing after shadows and fragmentary situations, exposed nerves, raw is too soft to describe this. Pull it back. Farther. The blood flows in. A woman sobbing. It's waiting there to bubble up. To spill out. As the night grows my veins turn into snakes. Hours crawl by. Buckets of sweat and frozen inside. I slowly and carefully take care of myself. Another congested moment full with the tears of a stifled romantic.

Autumn and no sun in this place. It's easy to turn nocturnal. No one out at 4am. The nights are long and clear. I'm wary of things which might loosen my edges. If I relax my vigil for a moment doubts consume me. The world says to simply get up and go. But I find nowhere. I surround myself in plans and fantasies. Who is this young thing in leather ahead of me on the sidewalk. I follow her. She meets her lover and they kiss on the corner. I slip past. Hungry all the time as I try to fill this hole in my chest. Aching joints and muscles, constant knots. Fingers stiff and cold. Skin dry and cracks to bleeding.

He hands his guilt to me over the phone. I say……Take it baby and place it deep up inside your sweet tight ass because you are not the cause of what is wrong with me. And you are not the remedy either. You are simply a momentary hole which I slipped through.

I'm not young today writing in the kitchen. The sun goes. I've spent the entire day alone in this house. Playing with my areas of discomfort. I map my disruption and see myself walking always on the fringes, barely affected by life. Disgusted at accomplishing nothing I get on a plane. I sit through the flight watching a girl staring at the TV screen, headphones on. Mouth hanging open and vacant stare. I'm reminded of myself and have to turn away.

Chicago
I line my cave with silk to dull the aches and the edges. The hollow street sound of the siren runs my spine into the floor. Mornings are not good at 6am. I make my way to the small job I barely manage to keep. Opening smell of mold and wet basement in the summer. I prepare food that I'm never hungry for.

Then he calls and says he's on his way.

Summer heat sweat with visions of water. Drips running down the walls to smooth me off. I lay on the floor of the basement apartment watching the insects crawling through the dust in the corner. In the heat with the cool wood pressed into the side of my face. Visions of water to cover the sweat that crawls across my skin. A fucked up board 6 layers of paint so I can look into this gap with the spiders gleaming pocket of flies wrapped up tighter than my intestines which twisted today so tight. As I crawl slowly through the small space left between the stickiness that follows the spider I'm careful not to disturb the threads. If I look up I see through plastic blinds once white now brown as the burned up trash in the 10ft yard with the El running above. I rarely look up. I press into the wood, I push with toes cracking off nails. He leaves and this time he won't be coming back. I'm glad for this finality but it comes too late.

Time bleeds as I pull myself through day after day. I throw away as much as possible and move again.

AND A SINGLE STIRRING FROM HER CUNT IS LIKE A CLEAR SIGNAL TO REVOLT.

NYC
Well, the future is a concept I just don't understand.

Automatic pilot to 7th St. see the smile and grab the fix. I know the fastest way to shatter. Watch that blood flooding, spreading, burst. I resist all claims to my existence. A dripping mucous like entanglement of memory tries to surround me but pull the needle back and space opens.

Fantasy lights flickering dim into the morning. I watch her bend over backwards with legs spread wide and she says to me why are you just standing there baby and her sequins shine on the thin fabric that stretches tight as she bends back with her legs wide open in invitation. I smile as she winks when she realizes I'm on another kind of high and she moves on down the table. Rip those sequins off you girl, lets slide right into this.

(Remember: time does not exist here.)

I give myself movies all day and all night. Sometimes I am the scene and sometimes I only watch. I'm just a cartoon cut-out that by the end has been blown up, blown out, just really blown altogether. Pull back, pull out. Nausea floats through the morning. After the ritual puking the day begins in earnest. It is a shrine - an alter against which all is held and judged. Drink from my hand and eat my shit fucker. I am so painfully nostalgic.

A long thin line stretching. Dragging in the mud and then that sensation that floats up your leg as you are walking very fast through Chinatown or the lower east side or anywhere it is late at night or the sun is just rising its just that you can do nothing because you must simply keep walking very fast it is only important that it be as fast as possible because as soon as you slow down that gnawing sensation begins again and again and there is no sleep here and then your boot hits 4 inches of water and baby that slowed resistance is beautiful. I hunt the night. There's a storm out here somewhere. Vigilance towards the chance encounter. It persists in remaining possible.

Maybe I've lost the thread of this scene but I never forget that bitter taste. Angels are falling from the sky as I walk alone from 7th to 4th. They pile up along the sidewalk and I shudder at the thought of stepping on one of them, the scream that I would raise. But there are too many....soon the spaces left to step are too small for my boots and I stop dead in horror. My lack of graceful movement has never been so apparent.

No time to catch my breath, I have reached that point of automatic pilot. Nose running, horns cut through my spine. 3 holes and an itching arm later that throat thing is back and once again I've become an expert with my own needles. I think of that meeting in a sewer pipe to share a bag in the cold. To connect this third point of our triangle. I panic and ride that needle hard to find my way out. Going to see him once I would have died to hold him again in my arms, to roll with him across the floor to touch once again running my finger across his lips softly a caress, shoulders emerge and embrace and then crush with veins popping. Blue fingernails gouge a hole deep through layers of steaming flesh covered in ink the arms reach again around my waist entering behind me where I can't see only feel them pulling and tearing and softly smoothing down edges that have been exposed.

I attempt to move through the day. Open all my pores, relax into a crevice. The moss surrounds and slowly begins to form a second skin. The weight of granite pushing as I become still. My body vibrates. Existing totally alone only in the moment, holding each day apart into individually wrapped slices.

No I'm not a junkie baby, I only have bad habits.

Well I thought I could do it alone one more time. Instant puking someone is really trying to kill me I must have been poisoned one night while I was on the nod because I've been puking for days now where did all this yellow and green bile come from anyway and the phone rings again are you OK yet no I am dying leave me the fuck alone. Long aching moments remembering a time of distance peace is not a viable option here and my stomach crawls away across the floor at the idea of trying to find it. I puke for two weeks not knowing more than a minute at a time. Listless and dull. Burning eyes. Aching joints and tendons hurt like hell. Hollow daydreams float minutes by as skin still aches and crawls. Sour odor; still sweat. My hands are new and must be examined. There is a slow grinding sensation where my neck used to be. The heat rises. I do nothing but excrete poison. Breath is in short supply but this pain in my belly is a place of focus. Retrograde motion. Solid walls of sound. Everything tastes like metal. Food is no pleasure. Muscles burn and my tendons are being pulled out slowly through my fingertips. I had a dream that he died and I smashed my face into the wall.

Sit in this chair and stare at nothing.

I wake to find a dead moth in the milk, and take this as a sign to leave.

Chicago
Arrival is a moment at dawn filled with exchanging smiles and averted eyes.

I still dream of moss. Of slipping into the rocks becoming still. The vines slip around my limbs, slowly rot into that soft dirt flesh bugs crawl through and all is silent. So I do a shot of cheap vodka in your honor. It's so quiet here. I can hear my blood pumping through my veins and this silence more than anything scares the shit out of me. I find a dead pigeon in the alley. I remember curiosity. Huge fucking gaps in my memory to piss me off never to be filled. Marbles rattle around in my skull. Immobilized, I listen to the rain on the roof.

AND SO BOREDOM FINALLY DROVE HER OUT INTO THE WORLD WHERE SHE LEARNED THAT ALL HAD NOT BEEN IN VAIN. THE TRUTH IS FOUND IN THE FORM OF A PIGEON FRESHLY SQUEEZED UNDER THE TIRES OF THE 4 DOOR STATION WAGON NOW RESIDING IN THE GRAVEL LOT.

Surrounded by people who don't understand cyclic disruption of personal reality. I fill the day with activity so I won't succumb to the craving to stop, not a rest, not a relaxation, but something that is sudden and violent and absolutely final. But at night I sit awake for long silent hours. Sometimes I search frantically for ways to break this suffocation but usually the effort is beyond me. My fingers trace the dark to find a small crack to pry open, allowing me to breathe. In the morning they are simply raw and bloody and I'm still gasping. Walk all night to wear out my body but my brain rides the night harder. It can be difficult to return home. Just keep fucking moving baby it's all you really know how to do.

Petty arguments all around me. The vise tightens down fast. Conformity is expected and the willingness to settle for less. One dozen eggs later and a bakers dozen is thirteen and if I have to eat another fucking egg I'm going to slam that frying pan over your head.

I stumble back and forth through the apartment looking for the object - the glance of something in the corner of my eye - some movement that will allow me to reopen. Then I wash my face.

She might stay for the sun. He had touched her. Conspirators.